Problem:
As we have heard in the summaries of the human ENCODE project, 80 per cent of junk DNA appears to have an essential function. Many fish have a genome with only one tenth the size of a usual vertebrate genome.
Question: Why can fish have 1/10th of junk DNA and be still fully functional?
Question: What has a frog more than a fish has?
I'm especially interested if we can see the difference somewhere, complexity of physiology or anatomy, or such.
Jap. puffer fish genome: 390 Megabases, 47,800-49,000 genes (UniProt)
Medaka genome: 690 Megabases, 24,600 genes
Clawed frog: 1,500 Megabases, 23,500 genes
Please provide full description of your answers.